The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 purports to move away from the identification doctrine, towards a genuinely organisational model of corporate liability. There is a risk, however, that insistence upon the involvement of senior management in corporate manslaughter will reduce the Act to doing no more than aggregating individual misconduct. Such an approach would fail both to encompass the culpability of the organisation as more than just a collection of individuals, and to offer an effective tool for the prosecution of large organisations. I argue that the senior management requirement should not be interpreted as focusing on individuals, but on the authoritative systems of work that organisations impose upon their employees. Inherent in large organisations is a corporate structure, determining the meaning and value of what employees perceive and the boundaries and direction of their work. These structures emerge from the involvement of senior managers, whose rank and role within organisations enables them to contribute to the development of corporate structure. Through insistence on the involvement of these corporate architects and surveyors, the 2007 Act may be seen to emphasise the role of the organisation in corporate manslaughter, identifying truly corporate culpability.

The Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 provides protection for whistleblowers; it does not place statutory obligations on regulators to act in response to whistleblowing concerns. Using Freedom of Information requests as a research methodology, this paper seeks to examine how whistleblowing is approached by regulators and what happens when a whistleblowing disclosure is made. Forty-eight national regulators in a variety of fields and 408 county, district and unitary local authorities with responsibility for the regulation of food were contacted. The paper begins by considering the importance of whistleblowing disclosures and how they are protected in PIDA. The examination of the law reveals that several organisations with important regulatory functions are not prescribed, and this has the potential to create inconsistencies in the protection of whistleblowers. The bulk of the paper examines the results of the Freedom of Information requests. By examining the results of these requests, it was possible to show that there are a number of inconsistencies in the way in which regulatory agencies handle concerns. Several changes to practice are suggested in order to ensure that the whistleblowers receive appropriate treatment and that the concerns that they express can be properly addressed.

Adapting the concept of ‘interpersonal justice’ used by Professor Robertson to provide a ‘meta-doctrinal’ defence of the law of negligence, this paper asks whether the personal injury system can be thought to have a democratic justification in common beliefs in such justice. It is widely acknowledged that the gross functional inadequacy of the personal injury system makes it implausible to claim that that system can be justified on grounds of compensation or deterrence. But that inadequacy makes it equally implausible to claim that common citizens would choose that system, which exists only because it is effectively compulsory. Constructing a market in first-person insurance would put the existence of the personal injury system to the test of actual choice.

In 2012, the Ministry of Justice asked the Law Commission to examine the case for extending the racially and religiously aggravated offences in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, so that they also cover disability, sexual orientation and transgender identity. The terms of reference for the project were narrow, and did not include an examination of whether the existing offences are in need of reform. The Commission recommended that before a final decision is taken as to whether the offences should be extended, a full-scale review of the operation of the existing offences should be carried out. This paper contends that, in determining the future of the aggravated offences, consideration should be given to the procedural difficulties that can be encountered during the prosecution stage of the criminal process. The paper highlights a number of significant procedural problems that arise from the structure of the existing aggravated offences. These problems are largely related to alternative charges, whereby the prosecution charge both the aggravated offence and the lesser offence encompassed within it, and alternative verdicts, whereby the jury can convict of the lesser offence if the aggravated element is not proven. This paper argues that the procedural problems, coupled with a failure to properly understand the offences, can lead, and have led, to unfair outcomes. If the offences cannot be prosecuted effectively, they become little more than an empty gesture to those affected by hate crime, and this may be counterproductive. Procedural problems also put defendants at risk of wrongful conviction. The paper concludes that the preferred way forward would be to repeal the racially and religiously aggravated offences and rely on sentencing legislation to deal with hostility-based offending.

This paper considers how employment laws are being used in response to what we have termed ‘the eldercare–workplace conundrum’. It is well known that people are now living longer but health is still failing in a significant percentage of older people, meaning that many adults require care for longer, albeit to varying degrees and for varying amounts of time. Many of these individuals will receive care from relatives or close friends who are participating in the labour market: this is increasingly likely as adults are expected or want to remain in paid work for longer, often into their sixties and seventies. The requirements of elderly dependants can cause these workers huge difficulties and dilemmas as they attempt, across time, to accommodate the particular needs of the person for whom they wish to provide care, often a loved one, and meet the particular demands of their employment relationship. In this paper, we consider why this is an area of social policy that warrants effective legal engagement and consider, drawing on various examples of legal responses in other countries that face similar conundrums, what might improve legal engagement in this area.

The aim of this paper is to reframe the taxonomy debate which has, in recent years, come to dominate private law theory. We argue that the debate to date has been flawed by two fundamental mistakes. First, little attention has been paid to how legal taxonomies are actually used. This, we argue, is regrettable: how we build a taxonomy depends on why we build a taxonomy, and a clearer focus on this question produces an approach that is very different from the approaches that currently dominate private law theory. Secondly, both sides in the debate have misunderstood what legal concepts are, and hence tend to misuse them. We argue that legal concepts are Weberian ideal types, and use philosophical theories of concepts to put forward a very different understanding of how concepts acquire content and are used in the legal system. Putting these together, we argue for a far more developmental, and historically informed, approach to taxonomy and to legal concepts generally.

The abolition of the default retirement age is creating challenges for UK employers, and universities in particular. Operating without mandatory retirement may have consequences for performance management, the creation of opportunities for new generations of workers, the scope for workforce planning and employment costs. Drawing on comparative experiences of Australian universities, which have been operating without mandatory retirement since the 1990s, this paper critically examines whether these consequences have materialised in Australia. It draws out a number of lessons for UK universities from the Australian experience.

Should people be required to know information about themselves that arises from their genetic test? This question is highly relevant given the NHS's plans to sequence 100,000 whole genomes before 2017. The approach to this issue in the USA generated significant opposition to requiring knowledge, on the basis that it interferes with autonomy. This piece presents a different perspective, arguing that requiring knowledge may not undermine the legal conception of autonomy, giving reason to doubt that it would be unlawful to require people to have genetic information about themselves. Following this, the piece presents an alternative principled position that might support a legal recognition of the interest in not having information about oneself; namely that of preventing personal harm. However, this approach runs into difficulties if the reasons for requiring knowledge are also based on preventing personal harm. The argument considers how interests might be balanced in this competing harms context.